We all (OK, most of us) know that we don't live in that world. Longtime political junkies know that any government shutdown will be made to seem the fault of the Republicans, no matter which party is in power at the time. Here's a tweet from NBC News this morning:

See how they did that? The way NBC has framed it, the key factors in the shutdown equation are President Trump and the GOP. The article the tweet links to does discuss the Democrats' pet DACA issue that's actually holding things up, but how many people who see this tweet are going to read that?

When a 2013 environmental impact report advocated the benefits of large-scale vegetation management in San Diego County, activists violently rejected its conclusions. As in the decades before, concerns over wildlife and environmental impacts were ultimately more important than the safety of fellow citizens, with the result that brush and dead vegetation were allowed to accumulate unimpeded for more than forty years.

Ironically, 2013 also saw a range of massive wildfires across California that were exacerbated by the U.S. Forest Service failing to follow through on crucial tree-thinning projects. The same happened immediately before the recent devastating fires, with the U.S. Forest Service once again neglecting to clear brush in the woods around Los Angeles as originally planned.

Worse still, government agencies have actively stymied rescue efforts. In this case, it was CAL FIRE withholding a license for a Boeing 747 Global SuperTanker firefighting plane, capable of dropping almost 20,000 gallons of fire retardant on the inferno below. Although the license was finally granted in September, precious months had passed during which the plane could have deployed to offer much needed fire-suppressing support across California. The Boeing subsequently proved instrumental in containing much of the fires ravaging California in December – less than a week after Donald Trump declared the California fires a national emergency.

I spent my formative years as a youth living in the White Mountains of Arizona surround by forest. Controlled burning by the Forest Service to get rid of potential fuel for out of control fires was a common thing then. Naturally, that was one of the first things that the environmentalists went after when they began flexing more political power. There is always some bird or fish that they prioritize over the lives of humans.